ed metals
floating around the great luminary,--iron, sodium, lithium, and
the rest,--as if the chemist of our remote planet could fill his
bell-glasses from its fiery atmosphere. It lends the power which flashes
our messages in thrills that leave the lazy chariot of day behind them.
It seals up a few dark grains in iron vases, and lo! at the touch of a
single spark, rises in smoke and flame a mighty Afrit with a voice
like thunder and an arm that shatters like an earthquake. The dreams of
Oriental fancy have become the sober facts of our every-day life, and
the chemist is the magician to whom we owe them.

To return to the colder scientific aspect of chemistry. It has shown
us how bodies stand affected to each other through an almost boundless
range of combinations. It has given us a most ingenious theory to
account for certain fixed relations in these combinations. It has
successfully eliminated a great number of proximate compounds, more or
less stable, from organic structures. It has invented others which form
the basis of long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we
are perhaps becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles,
demonstrated and hypothetical.

How much nearer have we come to the secret of force than Lully and Geber
and the whole crew of juggling alchemists? We have learned a great deal
about the how, what have we learned about the why?

Why does iron rust, while gold remains untarnished, and gold amalgamate,
while iron refuses the alliance of mercury?

The alchemists called gold Sol, the sun, and iron Mars, and pleased
themselves with fancied relations between these substances and the
heavenly bodies, by which they pretended to explain the facts they
observed. Some of their superstitions have lingered in practical
medicine to the present day, but chemistry has grown wise enough to
confess the fact of absolute ignorance.

What is it that makes common salt crystallize in the form of cubes,
and saltpetre in the shape of six-sided prisms? We see no reason why it
should not have been just the other way, salt in prisms and saltpetre in
cubes, or why either should take an exact geometrical outline, any more
than coagulating albumen.

But although we had given up attempting to explain the essential nature
of affinities and of crystalline types, we might have supposed that we
had at least fixed the identity of the substances with which we deal,
and determined the laws of their